For most recruiting and staffing agencies, the primary goal is to place as many qualified placements in positions as possible. However, to do this effectively, you have to manage the delicate balance between moving too quickly and giving each candidate and position the attention needed. Move too slowly through each potential hire, and your volume becomes too low; go too quickly, and you may miss qualified people.
That is why top staffing firms incorporate staffing skills tests into their recruiting process. More people are applying to jobs online than ever before, pushing the volume of applicants ever higher and putting more pressure on HR professionals to give each one a fair chance.
With eSkill’s Talent Assessment PlatformTM, you can quickly identify the candidates who possess the hard and soft skills they need to be considered a good match for the job — something that we call Job Fit.
Job Fit is an essential consideration for firms and applicants alike. According to Deloitte, 42% of employees who leave their positions do so because they believe their skills are going unused. Staffing agency skills tests can be used to create candidate profiles that not only indicate Job Fit for a specific position but can also be used to identify opportunities for placing that person later if a better-suited position becomes available.
How eSkill’s Staffing Skills Tests Work
The eSkill Talent Assessment PlatformTM is an easy, intuitive way to add skills testing to your agency’s recruitment process. The user-friendly dashboard gives you ready access to test results for every applicant, allowing you to manage results with several kinds of data visualization quickly.
If desired, you can even dig deeper into each candidate’s results, examining their performance on each question, broken down by difficulty.
Creating skills tests for your applicants is quick and straightforward. You can choose from options in the library of more than 800 ready-made subject- and job-based tests, create a custom test by combining multiple pre-made assessments, or hand-pick questions from eSkill’s massive library of questions. You can even add your own material, including video questions and workspace simulations.
The testing platform integrates seamlessly into nearly every kind of ATS software, so you can easily make staffing skills testing a part of your application process. You can email the test link to individual applicants or automate the system to send the link to every applicant, significantly speeding up the process. As each applicant completes the exam, the results will appear directly on your dashboard.
The Top Staffing Agency Skills Tests
While there are many pre-made tests designed for specific job openings, most staffing agencies prefer to administer more general tests to all applicants, offering more specialized assessments to those who advance in the process.
Here are some of the staffing skills tests that are most popular with staffing firms.
Basic Computer Skills
There are very few jobs left that do not require at least some degree of computer literacy. The Basic Computer Knowledge tests cover an applicant’s fundamental ability to navigate a digital environment, including operating systems, programs like Word and Excel, and internet and email.
For some positions, you may choose to focus more on specific programs. For instance, a data entry position may require more specialized Excel knowledge. You can do this by either adding additional questions or a simulation to the Basic Computer Knowledge test or administering the Data Entry Operator skills tests.
Organizational Skills
No matter what position you are in, organizational skills are imperative. With employees expected to take on more and more responsibilities, candidates need to demonstrate their abilities in multitasking, planning, and other related skills. This is especially true for employees working remotely; these employees are estimated to make up roughly 40% of all workers by the end of 2021.
Interpersonal Skills
Often overlooked, soft skills are among the most important parts of determining an employee’s Job Fit. In fact, according to a survey from LinkedIn, 89% of all recruiters believe that a lack of soft skills is responsible for bad hires.
eSkill has many staffing skills test options for assessing interpersonal skills. In addition to pre-made tests on Communication and Management, you can add video response questions to your tests to evaluate a candidate’s verbal communication skills and personality.
You can even set the parameters for hiring managers and hiring teams to score the responses and add comments to elaborate on why they rated each candidate as they did.
For staffing agencies, skills tests offer the ability to speed up your time-to-hire while also identifying the top candidates for your open positions. When you leverage these tests to your advantage, it can dramatically benefit your bottom line.
Interested in Using Staffing Skills Tests to Push Your Agency to the Top?
Learn how eSkill can help you find the best candidates for all of your available positions. Request a demo today.